Toner cartridge refurbishment and refilling is the practice of emptying, cleaning, and refilling laser printer toner cartridges with new toner powder. This enables the cartridge to be reused, thereby saving the cost of a complete new cartridge and saving the negative impact of the waste and disposal of the cartridge.
The refilling and/or refurbishment of toner cartridge may be done by an end user through the use of a toner refill kit, an original manufacturer, or a third party. When refilling and/or refurbishing a standard toner cartridge, the user refills and reuses the toner cartridge for a compatible printer. Current third party refilling and refurbishment services and products replace the toner with a similarly colored toner.
Traditional Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y), and Black (K) (or CMYK) Laser or Light Emitting Diode (LED) type printers come standard with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black toner and/or drum cartridges. However, traditional black toner printers and CMYK toner printers are generally unable to print in white on colored media, as these printers lack white toner and/or drum cartridges. Printing in white toner is feasible through the use of white toner printers and would generally allow a user to print on dark or clear media, but white media toner printers are usually very expensive and may require the user to buy an entirely new printer.
Typical CMYK printers use all four colors but assume that the media used is white. Thus, any blank or empty area in an image is assumed to be white by the printer. This is usually appropriate for light or white media, but typically causes problems when darker media is used. For example, a picture of a person wearing a white shirt on white paper will appear white, but will be the color of the media when colored media is used.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for converting or retrofitting a standard CMYK or black toner printer to print using white toner.